


The way to a man's heart is dessert

by AlbieGeorge



Category: Cricket RPF
Genre: AU, About two utter pumpkins, And very very fluffy, But crickety, Chris is steady and level and patient as always, It's all tropes and songs and snogs and stuff, Joe is emotionally retarded, M/M, Sorry for the weird fond fic, The other three are idiots for comic relief, There are many silly cricketer references for you to collect, and long, hotel au, indeed, like pokemon, like what even is this, this fic is weird
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-02
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-05-17 09:18:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14829572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlbieGeorge/pseuds/AlbieGeorge
Summary: For the prompt:"joe/chris - hotel AU (interpret this in anyway eg. they're both hotel workers or they're staying at the hotel or one of them owns the hotel and the other one works there etc.)"





	The way to a man's heart is dessert

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bananas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bananas/gifts).



> I mean seriously, I'm not sure what this is. It's a sort of fond waffle-a-thon about two absolute poppets. For the record, this is a pairing switch from the original prompt list, at the prompter's request.
> 
> Follow along with the with the references to other players and we can play cricketer reference bingo in the comments.
> 
> This is all very silly. I'm sorry. But if you like a bit of fluff, fill yer boots!
> 
> Tracklisting:  
> On the radio at the beginning: Rita Ora - Your Song  
> On Chris's Headphones: Regina Spektor - The Sword And The Pen  
> On the tinny portable speakers: Kat Flint - London Lullaby

Life wasn't what Joe had imagined.

He lay on his back and stared at the watermark on the ceiling that looked like a map of the Republic of Ireland.  Hurtling headlong into his mid-twenties, he was supposed to have it all figured out, right?  A top degree, a flat in The City, a pretty girlfriend who liked baking that he could take home to mum and dad and treat to holidays on his six figure salary.  Right?

"I think it's getting bigger." he said thoughtfully, wondering if Great Britain was about to be added to the watermark collection on the ceiling.

The man he had never quite managed to refer to as his boyfriend turned and took the approximately one and a half steps required to move from the kitchen counter to the middle of the lounge.  He peered awkwardly over his shoulder into the dusty mirror that was propped against the wardrobe and frowned.

"Is it?" he said, poking his underwear-clad bottom with an appraising finger.

"Not you arse, Christopher." Joe said rolling his eyes and smiling.  "Not everything's about your arse, you know."

Chris blushed in that way he did at near enough anything and, spatula in hand, returned to the eggs he was attempting to scramble.  Joe shuffled slightly down the bed and jabbed a toe into the muscular swell of Chris's backside as he passed, eliciting a little giggle that fluttered into the air then plucked out a pleasant tune on his heart strings.

"Well, not _quite_ everything, anyway."

Chris turned at that and grinned, wiggling an eyebrow at him and miming a slap with his spatula, narrowly avoiding shooting a fragment of semi-scrambled egg into the bed.  Joe closed his eyes and sunk down into the over-soft mattress.  The kettle bubbled its way to a full boil.  The smell of browning toast tickled Joe's nose invitingly.

So as it turned out, there was no six figure salary (unless you counted the pence), and his flat in The City had turned out to be a room in a shared flat above a pizza place that made all of his clothes smell like pepperoni.  He had a nagging suspicion that his flatmate would smell like pepperoni even if there was no pizza shop nearby, and he was working hard to convince himself that this was the reason he spent much of his off-work time curled up on the chintzy second-hand sofa of his gentle-hearted Brummy colleague.

So much for living the high life on a graduate scheme in London.  The job title of Junior Manager at the Parkside Excelsior had turned out to be little more than a glorified receptionist: a starchy uniform and sore feet and sorting out wealthy people's problems, but Joe was nothing if not a people person and a grafter, so he'd vowed to get on with it.

So that left the pretty girlfriend with the baked goods.  That particular conundrum was a couple of shades off blond, had once set the microwave on fire trying to make brownies, and was very definitely a man.  Joe smiled as Chris swayed along with the peppy pop music that tinkled from the radio as he fished tea bags out of mismatched mugs and deposited them in the bin.

**_Don't want to sing mad songs anymore  
Only want to sing your song_ **

Joe stopped singing along before the chorus hit and tried to ignore the lyrics, instead choosing to fuss with his phone.  Moments later, he was presented with a plate of food and huge, steaming mug of tea as Chris shuffled back into bed next to him, and they sat with their backs against the headboards, eating in companionable silence.  Joe grabbed the ketchup from the bedside table, where Chris had put it in anticipation of Joe's childlike palate.  He squeezed some onto his eggs.  A fart noise erupted from the near-empty bottle.  Joe giggled.  Chris shook his head fondly.

It wasn't that he wasn't out.  Joe was pretty sure that his mum had tried to set him up with every boy in their surburb of Sheffield at some point during his frequent trips home from university.  It was just that, despite a quick wit, a cheeky smile and the looks of a choirboy gone rogue, Joe walked into romantic disasters like the hapless guest star at the beginning of every episode of _Casualty_ , playing with a live electrical wire or jumping the fence to get closer to the tigers in the zoo.

He'd been surprised when his first real crush had been on a boy in his form.  This kid was tall for his age and wore a mask of surliness which dropped almost immediately when you got him alone.  They spent hours talking about music and football, and suddenly Joe found himself holding on to hugs for slightly too long, and blushing and quickly grabbing a cushion to disguise the implications of thoughts he didn’t think he was supposed to have about his mate.  Joe had fallen head over heels, the painful kind of teenage love that had you writing your initials inside badly drawn hearts on the squared paper of your maths book.

His mum had fussed over his grazed knees and ripped shirt.  The look on her face as she'd pressed a bag of frozen peas, hastily wrapped in a tea towel, to his probably broken nose had made Joe's jaw ache with held back tears.   He said he was fighting over football.  Someone had gone too far, crowing over the result of the Sheffield derby, and there'd been a scuffle.  In truth, a group of hard boys with number 1 cuts from the year above had found him and his first love in the PE equipment shed, tangled up in each other among faded netball bibs and endless unpaired shin guards.  The slurs had hurt more than the blows.  He'd never spoken to that boy again, both of them steadfastly looking down as they passed each other in the corridors.  Joe had muffled the big, painful sobs he’d cried in private into a pillow and told no-one, scratching angrily at his pain across the hearts drawn in his exercise books with a compass or obliterating them with Tippex.  Joe had looked him up on Facebook a couple of years back.  Married with a kid.  Funny old world.

Joe had been more cautious after that.  He'd locked away all of those feelings, chained them up as if punishing them, and got on with his schoolwork.  The text book golden boy, pride in his parents' eyes as he picked up his A level results and accepted a place at Leeds Uni. He left the claustrophobia of the suburbs for the monumental white university buildings crowded along the main road from the city centre out towards Headingley.

His affairs at university had been intense but short-lived.  There had been the huge, gentle captain of the university thirds, who was so dim that he'd had at least three attempts at his first year exams.  He hadn't understood Joe's romantic caution, and had left him for someone who he could cuddle in public.  Joe had rebounded onto his eccentric and violently ginger second year flatmate.  A series of intense and kebab-scented drunken fumbles were never spoken of the morning after except with sad-eyed confusion across the communal kitchen.  And then in his third year, that international student with the kind blue eyes, who listened more than he spoke and left Joe's heart in pieces when he completed his semester abroad and Joe wasn’t enough to make him stay another term.

He’d moved to London after graduation, wobbly of heart but strong of resolve to turn his life into the squeaky clean perfection of the testimonials in his graduate scheme's prospectus.  His early days at the hotel had been fairly run of the mill.  He was introduced to his immediate superior: a sensible, squared-jawed man with a shock of black hair that he often wearily ran his hands through.  Joe was immediately kitted out in an expensive-feeling uniform, navy trousers and waistcoat and a pale blue tie making him feel like a kid in his dad's work suit.  A shiny gold badge proclaiming his name was fastened to his waistcoat by his new boss, and he couldn't resist a joke about feeling like he was getting a CBE off the Queen, which was met with a raised eyebrow.

He settled into the steady routine of life, keeping a seemingly endless number of plates spinning and relishing the satisfaction of nothing crashing to the ground at the end of every shift.  He soon discovered Mrs Hedges, the eccentric long term resident on the 14th floor.  He was expressly told by the boss to keep Mrs Hedges happy; rumour had it that her second husband had been a middle-eastern oil billionaire, and she had discovered something so scandalous about him that when her fourth marriage broke down, she convinced him to pay for her to live at the hotel.  Mrs Hedges was prone to mood swings, suspicious-looking toyboys and the hotel's signature dessert, which was a kind of upscale back forest gateau with vanilla ice-cream and a hot cherry sauce in a fancy, heavy-bottomed flask that did good things to Joe's soul.  Rumour had it that this was only the hotel's signature dessert because Mrs Hedges hadn't let it be removed from the menu, to which it had been added back when black forest gateau was cool.  Rumour also had it that Mrs Hedges had been seen walking around the corridors of the hotel at night with a samurai sword.  Joe had decided that anyone who liked hot cherry sauce over vanilla ice-cream that much couldn't be all bad, and had consigned that last one to rumour.

His boss had had a strange, almost mischievous look on his face when he’d assigned Joe some of the hotel’s porters to manage, telling him it would be a good experience and look great on his CV.  He was given three to start with, a gang of layabouts so inept the he immediately nicknamed them the Three Stooges.  They appeared to be led by Jason, a muscular, strutting creature with a South African accent battered at the edges by years living in a grotty flat in Oval.  Jason was followed everywhere by Sam, who was cheerful and impossibly posh.  It turned out he'd run out of money on his gap year, and was working at the hotel to pay off a credit card debt while pretending to his parents that he was teaching yoga in Thailand.  Trailing along behind them both was Alex, who Joe was fairly sure had only been employed because of how ridiculous a powder blue bellhop uniform, complete with little round hat, looked on a 6'5" walking knob-joke.

Between running around after the whims of Mrs Hedges and expertly smoothing over the consequences of the ineptitude of the Stooges, Joe was usually ravenous by the third hour of his shift.  As a mechanism for survival in a city where a supermarket sandwich cost £4, he had become excellent at extracting food from the kitchens.  The surly head chef, all monobrow and five o’clock shadow, was easily distracted with a question about late 90s Britpop or mention of the boss, who Joe surmised he either had a stonking crush on or was planning to murder with a meat cleaver.

And it was while he was relishing the spoils of a particularly successful kitchen pilfer that Chris wandered into his life.  He was peering at the catering invoices, humming along to reception’s classical music and conducting the orchestra idly with one finger, adorned at its end with a plump profiterole, when Joe heard a polite clearing of the throat.  He looked up, startled, to find an attractive man with an unsure but nonetheless amused expression standing in front of him.  Joe quickly decided to style it out, finger in the air like an inverted exclamation mark.  The man looked at it and cocked his head on one side.

"Welcome to the Parkside Excelsior." Joe said, buffing the edges off his Sheffield accent.  "Can I interest you in a room today, sir, or perhaps," he wiggled his finger, "A profiterole that the head chef doesn't know I'm eating?"

He grinned his most charming grin at his handsome potential guest.  If he was a handsome mystery shopper from head office, Joe was deader that whatever animal Mr Grumpy was gleefully dismembering in the kitchen.  But he was cute, and Joe made bad decisions when he'd had too much sugar.

The stranger laughed, a gentle rosiness settling in his cheeks.

"Oh I couldn't." he said politely, "Not so soon after breakfast." his accent was warm and West Midlandsy and instantly endearing.

"I'm Chris," he said, extending a hand, "The new handyman."

There was a moment of confusion where Joe almost extended his profiteroled hand to meet Chris's, but the spherical pastry had effectively broken the ice, and Chris, soon decked out in a pair of jet black overalls embroidered with the hotel’s logo, returned frequently over the next few days for a chat about the north or to sate a rumbling tummy.

It was funny how things shifted, almost imperceptibly.  Joe suddenly found himself daydreaming in Tube carriages, smiling at strangers who fidgeted uneasily and looked away.  A glance here, a smile there.  Laughter bubbling up more frequently than normal.  Eating food pinched from under the nose of Lancashire's Grumpiest Man 2016, cross-legged on the over-soft break room sofa, knees touching, reaching to steal the best bits from each other’s haul.  Joe recalled a moment spent staring intently at his forearm as it tingled and fizzed at the recent contact of a hand, placed so casually there as Chris had leaned in to reassure him after Mrs Hedges had referred to him as a "jumped up little choirboy in a suit".  And a few minutes spent in shaky silence as Joe, the first aider on shift, had held on to Chris's hand tightly to stem the bleeding from a cut thumb, and found that he liked the way their hands fit together.  He'd tried to chase those feelings away.  Bantered more, worked harder, rationalised out his excuses for always needing a handyman on site.

"It isn't a crush," he said quietly to himself, as he watched Chris skilfully deflect one of Alex's knob jokes, and put up with Sam ruffling his hair a little too enthusiastically.  Chris looked over at him and smiled self-deprecatingly as he smoothed out his quiff, and Joe had to remind himself to look normal.

\---

As with many situations in Joe’s life, the shattering of his denial was catalysed by the ineptitude of the Three Stooges.  It had been Jason that presented himself to reception, the only indication of a pending crisis the slightly askew angle of his bell-boy cap.  The problem had been presented in Jason's South African-inflected deadpan.

"There's a pigeon in the first floor linen cupboard."

Joe had looked up from the booking screen, both eyebrows arched, and sighed.

"And before you tell me to sort it out myself," he'd continued, cap slipping further to one side and a flush rising to his cheeks, "The housekeepers have run a mile, Sam is so afraid of birds that I think he's having some kind of asthma attack in the corridor, and the last time I saw Alex he was asleep in the corner of the service lift mumbling something about the endless boobs of a woman named Mary."

A St Patrick's Day hangover indeed.

On their way to the first floor linen cupboard, Joe had recruited Chris, who had been standing, hands on hips, peacefully admiring the light fitting he'd just repaired.  Joe had looped an arm through Chris's without breaking stride, bringing him staggering alongside him with eyebrows raised and a questioning smile.  Joe rationalised that if you were about to rescue an oversized flying rat, you might as well do it with a man you definitely didn’t have a crush on.

Leaving Jason at a safe distance, instructing a jelly-legged Sam to "For God's sake, man, breath slowly" into a feminine hygiene disposal bag, Joe had cautiously opened the linen room door.  Chris, slightly taller, was pressed against his back, trying to peep in.  The sudden, solid warmth of Chris's body pressed against his back made Joe hesitate.  A beat of silence.  Chris's hand at his hip, emblazoning itself on his skin.  Joe felt his cheeks redden.

"What are we looking for?" Chris had whispered conspiratorially against his ear, and Joe had felt himself shiver all over.  When he'd glanced back at Chris, the hint of a smile indicated he'd felt it too.  Another heavy moment of silence, and then... flapping.  A huge, fat London pigeon had hauled its inbred body into the air and was careening around the room like it had a death wish.  Joe heard Sam distantly whimper.

Suddenly, Chris had a broom and Joe had unfurled a bed sheet, and they were working in a pincer formation to shepherd the wretched creature out of the tiny linen room window.  As the bird escaped with one final desperate beating of its flea-infested wings, Chris let out a whoop of victory and promptly toppled sideways off the chair we has standing on.  Joe flapped his newfound bed sheet wings and tried to catch him, and before they knew it, both were lying in a fluffly cloud of towels, cocooned in Joe's sheet.

Skin lit up bright by the sun through the linen.  The comforting smell of lavender thrown into the air by the softest of landings.  Rough overalls against his forearms.  The distant beeping of a delivery lorry reversing outside.  A huge pair of blue eyes was looking at him.

Chris lay on top of Joe, who found himself helplessly but pleasantly tangled in sheets and handyman.  Their faces were close, grins fading suddenly.  Joe's mouth opened and closed wordlessly a couple of times, before Chris leaned their foreheads together.  A question was asked and answered silently between glances.  And when the kiss came, the kiss Joe had been so careful not to consider, he felt himself give over to it entirely, a strange and pleasant ache rushing up through his chest to his cheeks as strong arms tightened around him and he was treated to coffee-scented, smiling kisses against his willing mouth.

The moment was punctured by an enquiry about their welfare from Jason.  Still too distant to be coming to check, but it was enough to put Joe right back in the kit shed at school, 16 year old knees shaking and a terrible fear settling in the pit of his stomach as he saw revulsion replace surprise on the faces of the school bullies who'd found their smoking hideout occupied by the most unwelcome of visitors.  His mind flashed back to the confusion, the fear, the feeling of hopelessness as he tried to stop his hands from shaking as he rebuttoned his thin school uniform shirt over his pigeon chest, heaving from the exertion of running away, only to have his progress hampered by the blood dripping from his nose onto his fingers.  Warm and red and full of life.  He winced painfully at the memory.

The snap back to reality.  A hand on his face.  A pained expression mirrored.  Coffee, lavender, motor oil.  A whispered apology.  The hand was gone.

“I thought you were…” The sudden cool air as Chris started to get up.  “Oh shit, I’m so sorry…”

When Jason walked into the doorway. Chris was setting the chair back on its legs and fussing over the broom, his face turned away, as Joe sat still in his nest of towels.  Sam followed close behind, quivering with fear and overcome with gratitude.  Back-slappings dispatched, all headed back to work.  Everyone felt awkward, except Jason who rarely felt awkward, and Alex who was still asleep in the service lift.  Joe felt like his feet each weighed a thousand tons, like when he'd been bowled for a duck on his first and only match for the university first team and he'd walked off to the opposition uni's supporters quacking at him.  Only worse.  Much worse.

He'd hunted for Chris all afternoon, but found him to be like a ninja in his black overalls, moving silently from job to job.  The arrival of a cricket team sized group of wealthy Pakistanis, a dizzying whirlwind of handshakes and dazzling smiles and rapidly-spoken Urdu, had kept Joe busy for the rest of the day, but he had one more stop to make before he could sink down into the depths of the break room sofa to wallow in his misery.  He didn't even laugh when Mrs Hedges careened round a corner and caught the boss right in the balls with her umbrella, causing him to fall, softly cursing, to the ground.  Well, he didn’t laugh _much_ , anyway.

He crept quietly into the low-lit kitchen, in search of the by now familiar comfort of hot cherry sauce mingling with cold, rich ice cream.  His mouth watered at the prospect as he darted behind a counter, only to find a warm, solid object blocking his path.  A minor stumble and a silent wide-eyed flail of the arms later, he made contact with the object, which let out a quiet oof.  The grumbling stopped and the chef made some unintelligible angry noises.  Joe went to speak, but found a hand securely clasped over his mouth.  He registered the faint smell of paint thinner and electrical cable before his eyes adjusted to the darkness to pick out the features of Chris's face.

The grumbling resumed, as Mr Grumpy continued to angrily put things away in drawers.  Joe could make out a rant about 'bloody kids' and 'needing to talk to their manager' which was followed by a short silence and a oddly non-angry sigh, but as the chef tidied his way over towards the far exit in rage, Joe's focus shifted to the fact that he was sitting on the lap of a man he'd effectively hit with a snog and run four hours earlier.  As if on cue, Chris shifted uncomfortably.

"You're going to have to stop falling into my arms, you know." A wary, nervous voice whispered quietly into his ear.  He turned his head to look at Chris, who was looking at him with an expression which drifted painfully between embarrassment and physical discomfort.

"Technically, you fell on me first." Joe whispered, resorting to his usual defence of humour.  He attempted a smile, which came out more watery and less sure of himself than he would usually manage.  Joe shifted so that his hip wasn't pressing uncomfortably into Chris's.

Chris sighed and looked down.  Joe's internal monologue shifted from a series of expletives slightly stronger than damnit to a single, desperate command.

_Do something._

Joe clenched his jaw and braced himself for the feeling of his heart shattering all over again.

"I did." Chris said sadly.  "Look, I'm s-" But his sentence was interrupted by Joe's lips as he leant in and kissed away the apology, suddenly not wanting to hear it, wanting instead to replace it with his own.  Joe had the distinct feeling he didn’t know what he was doing, that disaster was impending, that this was all going to end in tears mingling with cherry sauce and ice cream running down his chin, but there was something so oddly intoxicating about the man he was sort of awkwardly sitting on.  Chris's surprise soon melted away and Joe felt an arm snake around his waist and a tiny noise of approval as the kiss deepened, a hand finding the back of Chris's head to pull him closer, bothering his neatly coiffed hair.  Joe was sinking into the delicious feeling of Chris's tongue working against his own when he was startled by the metallic rustle of cutlery being shoved angrily into a drawer in alarming proximity to them.  They broke the kiss, wide-eyed and pink cheeked, barely breathing for the fear of being discovered.

Both jumped painfully as Mr Grumpy grunted and threw a leftover apple skilfully into the bin, its red shiny surface spinning, lit up in the light from their escape route.  Chris made a gesture that perfectly communicated the need to get out of the kitchen.  Joe nodded and they both got onto their hands and knees and started crawling to safety, but Joe stopped suddenly and turned.  He reached up to the counter, quietly taking one of the three small Thermoses of left over hot cherry sauce, waiting in a forlorn line at the sink to meet their fate down the plughole when the early morning crew came in.  Chris grinned and mouthed "We have to save the cherry sauce."  He swung around and offered a space in his backpack, and Joe couldn't suppress a chuckle as he realised there was a tub of 'saved' vanilla ice-cream  nestled between a spirit level and a rubber-banded collection of old bits of sandpaper.

Giddy from the adrenaline rush of their escape, they walked at speed down the corridor back to reception, digging each other in the ribs and giggling, ducking into alcoves for smiling smooches against ice machines and large decorative pot plants.  Joe had never felt so nervous as when he typed a false name into the booking system and charged a key-card, hands shaking as the light went green and the heavy lock of the unoccupied room clunked open.  As he backed into the room, looking out for witnesses, he could have sworn he saw Mrs Hedges pass the end of the corridor calling out for someone whose name he didn't recognise.

In their many subsequent episodes of saving the cherry sauce, Joe would always think back to that first night.  The sensation of ice cream snaking a cold path over his skin as it melted and was kissed and licked away.  Hot, dark cherry sauce sucked from inquisitive fingers.  The sweetness of ice cream, the tartness of cherries, the saltiness of skin.

When he'd woken with a start in the early morning silence of pre-rush hour London, he was almost surprised to find that Chris was still there, quietly agitating Joe's shoulder as he lay with his head on Chris's chest, urging Joe to think of a way for them to escape their potentially illegal romantic adventure with a twinkle in his eye and little kisses at Joe's hairline.

And Chris had continued to be there, quietly and gradually shoring-up Joe's battered view of romance.  He'd had to push down panic when Chris first grabbed his hand as they walked back to Chris's shabby ex-council bedsit in the unglamorous bit of West Kensington.  The upper class women in their heels browsing the air-conditioned minimalism of Knightsbridge and the clamouring school parties lining up outside the V&A gave way to the old widowers with flowers in hand at the Brompton Cemetery and the bustling middle eastern grocers and bakers of the North End Road.  Joe had expected a gang of his old school bullies to pop out of an alleyway at any time and chase him back to his teenage years, but no such moment had come.  Over the months that followed, the hours spent sorting laundry and left luggage and light fittings had left another L word hanging heavy in the air.  Joe felt the panic rear its head again if he thought about it, so he decided not to think about it often.

\---

"Mrs Hedges, she has gun!" The strong Latvian accent was not helping the conversation Joe was having with the new housekeeper on the 14th floor.  Nor was the fact that it was 8am on a Saturday.

"What?" Joe said, running his fingers absentmindedly through his unruly blond hair and immediately regretting it, knowing that he'd rendered it even wilder than before, and that Chris in all his other-worldly hair perfection would tease him about it later.  But that might lead to him trying to fix it, Joe mused, and rumpled his hair a bit further for good measure, in the hope that he'd get to feel long, gentle fingers against his scalp in a quiet moment in the break room later.  He smiled at the thought.

Suddenly he realised that the housekeeper was staring at him impatiently.

"Joe, please for me you have to do something!  She has gun!"

Joe frowned.  At that moment, the lady herself swung round a corner into view.  She was dressed in a gold crushed velvet tracksuit with a matching turban, and gestured wildly with a tall glass containing a clear, carbonated substance and a couple of ice cubes.  She had been behaving a bit more erratically recently, Joe thought, and bit his lip to quell a giggle at the prospect of the highly eccentric septuagenarian in front of him wielding a firearm.

"BOY." Mrs Hedges proclaimed imperiously, fixing him with a beady stare.  Joe jumped, and stood up straight. "There's no lime in my G&T, and the man at the bar says he hasn't got any."

The penny dropped and Joe turned to the housekeeper and grinned.

"Oh, GIN!" he exclaimed triumphantly, "Mrs Hedges has gin!" He turned to the older woman and put on his best customer service voice. "For which she absolutely _does_ need a slice of lime." Joe wrongfooted Mrs Hedges with a winning smile, and headed off to the kitchen to run the gauntlet of the grumpy chef, leaving the two women staring at each other uneasily.

Citrus safely deposited into glass, Joe slumped into a chair at reception and watched the chuntering old biddy meander off toward the spa.

"Do you think Mrs Hedges is getting weirder?" he asked Chris later, as they lay in bed, clinging to each other for warmth as the cold November evening made its presence felt through the single glazing.

"This is the least sexy pillow talk you've ever tried." Chris said with a smile, fingers creeping underneath the waistband of Joe's fleecy pyjama trousers.

"Seriously!" Joe said, slapping away the hand and grinning at Chris.  "She keeps asking me about someone called Ronald, and yesterday she threatened to kill Alex with a loofah."

Chris chuckled.

"I'd like to see that." he said, and Joe laughed.  "But Ronald is her new dog.  Little yappy white thing.  That shifty-looking boyfriend of hers bought it for her.  She's paying one of the housekeepers to hide it in one of the linen cupboards on 14.  Funny looking little chap.  It looks like a fella I used to play cricket with in Birmingham."

Joe would have paid more attention to this information, but Chris's hand was back, and this time it was creeping up under his shirt, and as soon as he'd finished talking, his lips found work near Joe's collarbone.  He lifted his chin to afford Chris better access.

\---

13 hours.  13 hours he'd been at work.  Everyone and his mother was off sick with the flu, and Joe had been stretched thin keeping the wealthy Christmas shoppers happy as they trailed in rain and dirt from the streets outside onto the pristine carpets of reception to make their demands to Joe.

Chris had arrived half way through the day, like a cheerful angel with wind-reddened cheeks, to start his own shift.  He'd brought pastries and coffee, even though it was half past two in the afternoon.   It was amazing how sucking strawberry jam and croissant flakes from butter-scented fingers could sustain a man through even the gnarliest of shifts.

At half past nine, Joe had waved Chris off as he waited for the lift to the 12th floor to deliver a bottle opener and some more sauvignon blanc.  Chris's overalls had been discarded for a white t-shirt and jeans, headphones already in his ears, head nodding appreciatively.  He smiled as he saw Chris's sweet tooth present itself as he swerved to swipe complementary mints in shiny wrappers from the bowl at reception.  A phone started ringing.  The lift door closed.

Ten minutes later he returned to a yellow post-it in Chris's familiar handwriting.

_Hedges is peckish.  Gone to 'save' her some cherry sauce and cake.  See you later xx_

Joe sat down at reception, head in hands and wallowed in his exhaustion for a minute.  He wondered if he could be bothered to go and get another cup of burnt-tasting coffee from the break room.  He decided that he couldn't and pressed his fingers to his temples as he closed his eyes.  A few moments later, that Joe would have badged as meditation, but that might have been a nap, the phone rang again.  Room 1402.  Hedges HQ.  Joe sighed.

"BOY!"  The familiar salutation was higher pitched than usual, and strained.

"How can I help, Mrs Hedges?" Joe asked.

"I want my Ronald!" she was practically shouting.  "You've sent up this scruffy man with cake.  Cake of all things!  Where is my Ronald?  You've stolen him, and I want to know why!  Bring me my Ronald or it's curtains for the kid.  CURTAINS I tell you!"  Joe could tell from the effort in her voice that the mad old biddy was gesturing with something.  Joe wondered with a weary smile whether it was a loofah.  He called a lift and headed to the 14th floor.  In the second linen cupboard he tried, Joe found a crate, covered in pristine white towels, in which was a small, irritated looking maltese.  He cautiously negotiated it into his arms, and headed to 1402, knocking briskly at the door, and putting his customer service voice back on.

"Mrs Hedges, Ronald and I are here to see you."

Joe realised as the door was pulled open that he'd never seen a gun before.  The smooth, shiny metal of the revolver, clasped tight in a slightly shaking wrinkled hand commanded his attention and sent a cold shiver of terror down his spine.

Suddenly the room was ablaze with activity.  Mrs Hedges shouted for the dog, which leapt from Joe's arms, sending her staggering backwards into the room in surprise, arms flailing.  Then a bang so loud it left a ringing behind it, like negative space.

A fall to the floor, the buckling of the knees instinctive, the impact of the carpeted floor irresistible.  An oddly comforting warmth.  An inexorable outward motion.  White fabric soaked in graphic deep red advancing from centre to edge.

Joe never believed it when people said that, at critical moments, things happen in slow motion.  But he felt every hair stand up on his arms and cold sweat drench him in the moments after the gun discharged.  He was aware that his mouth was moving, but could hear no sound other than a high-pitched ringing.  Mrs Hedges was screaming, one had in a fist by her side, the other desperately gesturing with a loaded gun.  Joe fell to his knees as the second shot rang out.  He wasn't sure he would have felt it even if he had been hit.  Because all he could see was Chris.

He was curled up on his side, facing away.  He was so still.  Joe lunged forward, covering Chris's body with his own as a third shot ripped through the room.

Barely breathing, he peered into the streak of light and colour between the bed and the floor.  The tinny sound from Chris's headphones, dislodged in the riot from their listener's ears, gave the scene an oddly surreal feel.  Regina Spektor sung about God.  A pair of stilettoed feet, uncertain in their movement, toed the carpet.

"Ronald?"

The dull thud as gun hit carpet.  The slam of a door.  The slow-motion, terrible, empty feeling suddenly overwhelmed by the hot, sharp pain of every nerve firing all at once, rushing to his face and his fingertips, making him feel like he couldn't pull air into his lungs.  Lyrics hung in the air.

**_So what if no one is saved?_ **

Joe could feel nothing and everything all at once.  He rolled off of Chris, and felt the terror in the pit of his stomach rise into his throat, the everything consuming the nothing as he realised his left hand, which had been gripping Chris tight around the middle, was soaked and red.  The terrible liquid wicked into the stiff material of his uniform cuff.

He rolled Chris onto his back.  It was everywhere.  His hands were on Chris's chest.  Where was it even coming from?  He heard himself scream for help.  A huge pair of blue eyes was looking at him.

**_No matter how sweet  
No matter how brave_ **

He took Chris's face in his hands.  This couldn't be it.

**_What if each to his own lonely grave?_ **

"This can't be happening." he said softly.  The word no came to his lips, and kept coming, as if to defy what he saw in front of him.

"No." came the echo.

Joe stopped in his tracks.

"No," Chris suddenly shuffled to a half sitting position, eyes still huge and frightened, and raised an object between their bodies. "This... this _isn't_ happening..."

Joe looked down at the flask of cherry sauce.  The thick, warm, dark red liquid still dribbled from the small round bullet hole near the heavy metal base.

Chris and Joe stared at each other.

"The cherry sauce saved _us_." Chris said.

Joe said nothing, and pressed his forehead to Chris's, wrapping his arms tight around him.  Tears he didn't know he'd been crying mingled with cherry sauce.

\---

Chris's parents were going on a cruise for Christmas.  He and Joe lay side by side on top of the mismatched covers on the bed, peering at the watermark on the ceiling that looked like a map of the Republic of Ireland.

"I should go upstairs and offer to fix the pipes for them." Chris mused, distracting himself from the prospect of a Christmas spent with his least favourite cousin and her painfully boring husband.  Joe arched an eyebrow.

"That sounds like the beginning of a porn."

Chris turned his head to look at Joe, trying to hide the smile playing at the corners of his mouth with an incredulous look.

"And how would you know, Joseph?" he asked, and Joe grinned.

"Do you miss Mrs Hedges? " Chris asked suddenly.  Joe shook his head.

"Why do we always talk about Mrs Hedges when we're in bed?" he asked with a smile.

"Don't kink shame, Joe." Chris replied with fake seriousness that fell immediately into a giggle.

"No." Joe said, "I don't miss her.  She may have been high on the prescription drugs that new boyfriend was slipping her, but she shot you."

Chris smiled.

"She shot the cherry sauce, to be fair."

"Well," Joe mused, "She tried to shoot you, and she shot the cherry sauce.  And if there are two things you know I love, it's the cherry sauce and-"

Joe stopped, face burning.  Chris paused, thoughtfully, and chose to say nothing.

They turned their attention back to the ceiling.  Awkward silence progressively faded back to companionable silence.  And Joe internally, quietly let in the achy, warm sensation that he'd been steadfastly defending away like an opening batsman on a treacherous wicket.  It had been teasing, testing, swinging away and safely through to the keeper.  But suddenly, without warning, it nipped back in.  Straight through the gate and Joe was all at sea as the L word squeezed at his heart.  Joe would later berate himself that it took Chris getting shot in the cherry sauce to open this particular floodgate, or so as not to mix his metaphors, that triggered the middle order batting collapse that led to a declaration of feelings.

The portable speaker, perched jauntily atop a stack of unread books and pizza leaflets and gas bills of questionable payment status, tinkled with minor chords and soft Scottish accented lyrics.

**_But I'll be here my dear, patiently waiting in line  
To be near you when you're ready to make up your mind_ **

In the end, he almost surprised himself with his own bravery.  He grabbed his phone from the bedside table.  Contacts.  Home.  Call.

"Mum?" Joe said, quietly.

"Hello, poppet." came the tinny response.  Chris grinned at the affectionate name, and Joe, despite himself, elbowed him in the side.

"Mum...I...." Joe closed his eyes and exhaled, centring himself.  "Mum, can Chris come for Christmas?"

The sentence, sudden and clear, stopped Chris's smile in its tracks.  Joe felt Chris's eyes on him and his fingers interlock with his own as Chris quickly found his hand.  Joe looked resolutely at the ceiling.

A small, dense silence.  Chris squeezed Joe's hand.

**_Families built from strangers one by one_ **

"Of course he can love!  That'd be lovely.  Because you know your brother is bringing his girlfriend this year, so it would be lovely for you to bring your boyfriend.  You tell him we're looking forward to seeing him, won't you?"  There was the sound of rummaging in a drawer, the click of the end of a ballpoint pen.  "Now, let me just adjust my shopping list now so I don't forget..."  The voice trailed off slightly, "You know I might have to do a bigger Christmas pudding love, the amount you boys eat..."

Joe wasn't really listening.  He was staring at Chris.  The boyfriend his parents had decided that he had before he'd even decided that he had a boyfriend.  What was he even thinking?  It'd been months.  Chris had met his parents.  Chris's eyebrows were making for his hairline, a questioning look on his face.  Joe's face reddened.

"My... my boyfriend." he blurted out, like his brain was testing the fit of the word.  More of a statement than a question.

Joe's mum stopped rummaging.

"Oh dear, love, I haven't made a terrible prat of myself have I?" she asked, "It's not just... now what did our Billy call it... it's not just a bromance is it?  I mean, he's all you talk about, I just..."

"Mum." Joe took a deep breath and looked Chris square in the eyes. "He's my boyfriend."  Chris's face broke into the kind of smile that would make flowers bloom and birds sit on your shoulder to sing.  "And actually, I think I... love him.  Quite a lot."  He let the rest of the breath out and closed his eyes, waiting for the universe to implode, or a giant hand to come out of the sky and slap him around the face for daring to put a name to what was bothering his heart.

He felt Chris let go of his hand and roll towards him, snuggling in against his left side.  Not exactly a slap from the giant hand of regret.  The world didn't end.  A thin and watery sun broke out over the grey scenery inside his head.  Joe hooked an arm around Chris's waist and held on for dear life.

His mum chuckled affectionately.  Suddenly a cacophony of barking and scrabbling came down the line.

"Oh that's lovely petal, but I've got to dash.  There's a squirrel in the garden and the dog's going mental.  I'll call you later on?"  The tone of a dead line punctured the silence between songs.

Minor chords shifted to major as the next song started.

"Love you too, petal." murmured Chris, putting on Joe's mum's Yorkshire accent as he smiled against Joe's skin.  Joe felt that familiar feeling squeeze his heart again.

Joe stared at the ceiling and smiled as he felt his boyfriend kiss his neck.  He could swear that watermark was getting bigger.

Life wasn't what Joe had imagined.


End file.
